


there we'll find peace

by sable_tyger (orphan_account)



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes (Downey films)
Genre: Established Relationship, Illnesses, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-04
Updated: 2012-02-04
Packaged: 2017-10-30 14:52:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/332949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/sable_tyger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Holmes is dying. Watson doesn’t know, and then he does. <em>Holmes/Watson</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	there we'll find peace

_love is not love / which alters when it alteration finds._  
Sonnet 116, William Shakespeare

+

There was a time when he had thought he would live forever.

Granted—he had been very small, then, no more than a child. Even he’d had his fair share of childish naiveté. This had also been the time when he’d looked at the world and thought to himself: _I am going to know all there is to know about you, every truth, every hidden secret._ The world would not surrender its mysteries willingly, but that was just fine, he liked the challenge.

And then he grew up and he still likes the challenge, and he might not know everything but he knows a lot and is always learning more, yet some dark secret part of himself has not forgotten what it feels like to never realize that your feet will not always walk this earth. That part of himself has not forgotten that he once thought he was going to live forever.

And so—it’s a shock, then, when he’s forced to realize, _no, you’re not._

+

The cigarette dips between his fingers, trailing lit ashes and smoke. He taps it against the banister and leans forward into the wind and the sounds of the city, his city, as they remind him that he is home. He puts the cigarette between his lips and quells the sudden urge to smile with all his teeth, bared. The smoke is ashes on his tongue.

He knows Watson is there before he turns to look, before Watson speaks. He is a compass, his needle tugged ever north, only true north is not an ever-fixed mark as he was once led to believe; it follows that which leads him onwards, ever on, and when Watson is not there it spins and spins like a child’s top, wobbling on its axis, directionless.

Watson makes a noise in the back of his throat, and Holmes thinks he’s going to tell him to put out the cigarette, but then Watson says, “Care to share with the class, Holmes?” and takes another from Holmes’ breast pocket without waiting for his response. His fingers are nimble-swift, ink-stained. “Match?”

Holmes shrugs, holding out his empty hands palms-upward. Watson scowls like he doesn’t believe him and leans forward into Holmes’ space, his stolen cigarette between his lips. He lights it off the orange-lit end of the one in Holmes’ mouth, his cheeks hollowing briefly, and Holmes has to take a moment to breathe, they’re so close.

Watson leans away and breathes the smoke into Holmes’ face, smiling because he thinks he knows all his secrets. “You are insufferable,” he says as Holmes’ eyes water.

“And you’re a thief,” says Holmes. “We can’t all be perfect.”

“These are _my_ cigarettes.” Watson braces himself against the railing and looks down at the street, the long lines of his body smooth, drawing the eye. “Where’s your pipe?”

Holmes flicks ash towards him. “I must have misplaced it.”

And Watson is smiling, gray smoke trailing between his teeth, and Holmes has no right to be so happy just to look at him, to see him like this. Watson doesn’t say a thing, simply steps closer to Holmes, slips his hand into Holmes’ left pocket, his slender fingers closing around the pipe secreted away there, unused.

“Hm,” Holmes murmurs. “You’ve caught me.”

“You never could keep anything from me,” Watson agrees, and then his free hand is against Holmes’ jaw, and Holmes just has time to take the cigarette from his mouth before Watson is kissing him, gently— _that’s what you think, John._

He nudges him away, “Not here, Watson, look around for God’s sake,” but the passersby never look up, no one ever looks up at the windows and empty faces of the buildings above them; Watson kisses Holmes again, deeply, tasting like ashes and cigarettes, and Holmes wants to tell him then, he does, truly, but he cannot bring himself to speak.

+

He isn’t sure how long he’s been dying. He only knows when he’d first realized that something was wrong, the truth so suddenly, blindingly apparent as to be undeniable. He remembers Watson outside the bathroom door, tapping to be let in. The straight razor in his hands, slipping up the length of his throat, gentle pressure. The light in the bathroom had been too dim, strangely hazy. Later Holmes will think that is unusual, but he doesn’t notice at the time because his hands are shaking and he cannot steady them. The straight razor, cool in his fingertips, fragments the reflected light, and it slips in his unsteady hands and there’s blood on his throat, spilling down his neck— _fuck,_ the razor clatters into the sink, his hands press against the cut, a half-centimeter deep, and covered in blood they never stop shaking.

“Holmes?”

Watson’s voice through the door, irritated; they were supposed to leave for the opera ten minutes ago. 

“Just a minute,” Holmes rasps. He’s surprised by how his voice betrays him.

Silence, and then: “Let me in, Holmes.”

He does so, his hand bloody against the doorknob so that it’s gold and crimson-streaked. Watson sees the straight razor, the blood in the sink, Holmes’ trembling fingers and he hisses a breath, sharp and unsteady—“Fucking _hell,_ what happened, are you all right?”

“Fine,” Holmes says weakly. “The razor slipped.”

“You careless….” Watson’s voice trails away. “Here, come into the light.” He tilts Holmes’ head back so he can examine the wound, its edges pulling away from each other. He cleans and tapes it, his mouth grim and set, his lips thinning, and then he makes Holmes lean back against the sink—“You can’t go around half-shaven, you’ll look positively mad—more so than usual”—and picks up the straight razor and holds it under the tap, the blood sluicing off into the pink-stained sink. He sets to finishing what Holmes started, the blade gentle against Holmes’ throat, slow careful strokes upwards and then the smooth brush of his thumb over bare skin.

Holmes hides the shaking of his hands easily, braces them against the sink, but that doesn’t mean they’ve stopped.

“There.” One last swipe of the razor, a kiss pressed to his clean-shaven throat. “You daft fool. Promise you won’t scare me like that again.”

“I won’t,” Holmes says. He doesn’t know yet that that won’t prove true.

+

Things he’s noticed and dismissed over the past several months suddenly become of the utmost import, unforgettable. The debilitating headaches, once a rarity, now increasingly common. The slow but steady weight loss he’d attributed to stress. And then there are new things to notice, new— _symptoms,_ even: subtle vertigo, as the world sways around him; weakness in his fingers and hands, which sometimes go tingling and numb.

He visits a doctor, secretly, taking care to call upon one who has no connections with Watson. He covers his tracks and gives a false identity anyway, because—he is not sure why. He does not care to think about it.

Dr. Loren, his thick glasses heavy beneath his dark brows, rereading the results of the tests, his fingers underscoring the words. _I am so sorry, Mr. Hamish. But the results undisputedly indicate that the degenerative nature of your disease is incurable._

Well. Holmes opens and closes the fingers of his right hand, watching as they shake.

“There are some treatments we might try,” Dr. Loren continues. “To lessen any discomfort and pain you might experience in the next few years.”

That’s an optimistic estimate, _a few years._

“We’ll be in touch, Doctor,” Holmes says, and thanks him on his way out. Dr. Loren never sees him again, and if he tries to find him, well; the man he’s looking for does not exist.

Holmes walks home to 221B Baker Street in the cold, hard rain and starts his next case. And then another.

He doesn’t tell Watson.

+

He dreams, or at least he thinks they’re dreams, the edges all soft and dark and indistinct, and the outcomes are always the same though the methods are not. Knife wounds. Bullets. Asphyxiation. Drowning. Falls. Desanguination. Fire. Explosions. Torture. A wasting sickness, degenerative over time.

It’s strange, though—he’s the one who’s dying, and yet it never happens that way when he dreams. He wakes up with Watson’s blood on his hands again and again, the blood pouring between his fingers and washing down his wrists in rivulets, spilling to the floor. He wakes up. And wakes up. And wakes up. And—

+

He hides it well. He wakes gasping more often than not, but he takes care to prevent Watson from noticing. He chokes on his own breath as he forces himself back into silence, his fingers scrabbling at the bed and digging digging digging into the mattress, harder, to stop the trembling he can never really banish, his heart pounding behind his eyes and in his ears and he can still feel the blood that isn’t his dripping off his wrists and pooling on the sheets, damp and smelling like metal in the pouring rain.

Trembling all over with the effort not to wake Watson, Holmes will lie there, night after night, as the pounding of his heart fades, as the heaving of his chest slows, as the death grip of his fingers loosens and the blood clots slowly on the bed and dries and disappears with the moonlight which wanes in the curtained window and falls on the bed in slashed slivers, bounded. Then he slips from the bed, silently, careful not to let the cool night air under the blankets, and goes from the room. He paces around the fireplace and opens and closes most of the books in his possession, peering at their half-formed letters in the dim light from the windows, and then he goes into the bathroom and scrubs his hands for a quarter of an hour, so roughly that the skin comes off in scrapes and the water turns pink and he thinks he will claw off his fingernails if he doesn’t stop, claw them right off as he tries to tear away everything that he can’t stand to think about. His skin crawls and his hands go numb and _not now,_ he thinks, _please, God, no, not now, not again,_ and he will return to the living room with his scraped-raw hands and pretend that he can still feel them and Watson will slumber on in the next room, undisturbed.

It’s harder to hide this from Watson in the day, when there might not be blood on Holmes’ hands but there’s the thinness of his body, so impossible to hide, all hard and cutting angles like a straight razor against the folds of his clothing. There’s the hollowness of his voice, he smokes all the time now, _oh, sorry, it must be my pipe, your cigarettes, you know,_ when his voice drops a register uncontrollably or rasps like pouring sand. There’s the difficulty he has with lifting even the simplest things, with ascending and descending stairs, with fucking _walking,_ God, how much longer will he be able to go from room to room of his own power, how long until he can no longer stroll down London’s streets with Watson on his arm, how long until he can’t leave 221B and follow a lead and walk along the spiraling path of a case unfolding—!

What use is a consulting detective who can’t solve cases?

Not that any of this will matter, soon enough.

+

In the end, he doesn’t have to tell Watson, because Watson notices.

Holmes has been waiting for Watson to realize. He almost expected it earlier, and he’s been agonizing, waiting, wondering whether Watson will ever know or if he’ll have to take the braver route, the one he should have taken from the beginning, and tell Watson, face-to-face.

But he waits instead, choosing the coward’s way out and hating himself for it, hating himself every minute the silence between them deepens and his ears ring with all the things he has not said.

They’re at the Royale _(“Your favorite,” and Watson had smiled, so brilliantly)._ It’s late, the clatter of the other diners slowly winding down as the two of them sip at their wine and content themselves to a few murmured words of conversation, Watson comfortable in their silences, Holmes chafing beneath them. Silverware has begun to pose an intense difficulty to him, so usually he simply does not eat unless Watson forces him, which only leads to the further angularity of his limbs, the sharp jut of his cheekbones, the hollow pallor of his eyes—God, he looks in the mirror and he doesn’t fucking know who he is anymore, is this how he has to live until his spare years or less are up, counting down the weeks in weight lost and muscles weakened?

Then Watson is looking at him, at the unsteadiness of the glass in his hands, at the too-bony curl of his fingers around the stem, and Holmes watches as the recognition dawns in Watson’s eyes—slowly, like the pull of the tide, whispering as it washes everything else away.

Watson does not say anything until they’re home again, the clatter of the horse-drawn carriage too loud in Holmes’ ears as it lumbers down the street. Watson holds the door open—watching as Holmes lingers on the stairs, his grip too tight on the banister, too reliant—and then shuts it, softly, behind them.

“Holmes,” he says.

“I don’t want to talk about this,” Holmes says, and means _I can think of nothing else, God, John, I’m sorry._

Watson stares at him, bathed in the glow of the street lamp filtering in through the front window, his eyes wide and disbelieving, his face descending, quickly, into anguish before he forces that away—“Goddammit, Holmes, tell me what’s going on.”

“If you mean this—” Holmes lifts his hand off the banister and it trembles, uncontrollably— “then there is not very much to say.”

“Of course I mean—God, you utterly _infuriating_ —why didn’t you _tell_ me, why didn’t you say, how long have you lived with this and I didn’t even know, I didn’t guess—?” Watson’s hands flutter at his side, uselessly. “You went to a doctor.”

“Yes.”

If pain crosses Watson’s features, it’s hidden by the shadows of the room. “And what did he say?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Holmes says.

 _“It doesn’t—”_ Watson catches himself, stops. “Talk to me, damn it, _talk to me.”_

And Holmes—God help him, Holmes does.

+

“How long,” Watson says, and for a painful, unbearable moment, Holmes thinks he’s asking _how long do we have left?_

“How long have you known?” Watson repeats in the face of Holmes’ silence, the words scraping from the back of his throat.

“Seven months,” Holmes says.

Watson’s breath hisses between his teeth, sharp and wheezing and hurt; he looks torn between crumpling in on himself and simply walking away, without looking back—“Why didn’t you tell me,” he says, half-sobs, “why didn’t you tell me, Jesus Christ, Holmes, seven _months—”_

If Holmes knew why, he would answer.

As it is, it is all he can do to put his arms around Watson and hold onto him even as Watson tries to pull away, bitterly angry. Holmes can’t help it, it’s selfish, he hates himself for it even as Watson relaxes in his grip, tear-stained.

+

He looks out the window at the street below and thinks of all the places he wishes he’d seen. He thinks of traveling with Watson, the way Watson’s face would light up upon seeing something spectacularly beautiful, what it would be like to walk a new city with him and feel the warmth of a different latitude’s sun against their faces.

He clutches the sketch on his lap, trying not to smudge the ink, gently setting down the pen—fuck, he can’t hold it steady, damn it all; the inkwell spills and spreads like blood across the yellowing paper, eradicating the skyline he’d carefully, lovingly recreated, London in miniature, rising tall against the smoky surface of the Thames— _damn it,_ the tears sting hot and suddenly against the backs of his eyes, he crumples the paper in his fist and smears ink all over his face as he presses his hand to his forehead.

This is how Watson will find him in less than an hour’s time when he returns from his rounds with his _(other)_ patients; he will gently take the pen from Holmes’ hand and kiss his fingers, every one, and wipe the ink from his face with a damp washcloth, and then he will take the back of Holmes’ chair and wheel him carefully into the bedroom and help him undress. Holmes can’t walk now, he hasn’t been able to walk in three months; it’s been thirteen since he first spoke to Dr. Loren and he can feel the inevitability of time bearing down on him, _a few years_ Loren had said, but that won’t be long enough, he’ll never have time for all the things he wishes he’d said.

 _Watson,_ Holmes will say and try not to sound like he feels— _Watson, I’m sorry, I never wanted this—_

 _Nonsense,_ Watson will say, dismissively; he thinks it’s a spare piece of luck that he can take care of Holmes so well, being a doctor after all—Holmes can only think it is cruel, unerringly cruel, that Watson will be forced to watch him die and know every detail of that progression as well Holmes himself does.

+

Later still, Watson will creep back into the sitting room, through the darkness, Holmes asleep at last—it’s harder now for him to fall asleep, and the dreams he’d once hid so well are less and less possible to conceal, Watson has woken him from them several times and pressed his mouth against Holmes’ to keep him from screaming—and he’ll steal to the window like a wraith. The crumpled drawing will be where Holmes left it.

Watson will pick it up and smooth it out and be able to see, just barely, the drawing underneath the spilled ink that has almost ruined it—he will trace the careful lines and then pocket the slip of paper, his fingers cold as they slide over it, and he will whisper something that Holmes, in the throes of a new nightmare, will not hear.

He whispers, _I’m not sorry._

+

Holmes dies on a Thursday, cold and rainy, with Watson at his side.

“I haven’t forgotten the promise you made me,” Watson says, his fingertips light at the curve of Holmes’ collarbone. “When you said that you’d never scare me like this again.”

Holmes huffs a laugh, raspy and quickly aborted. “Sorry,” he says, the syllables slurring into the one. He watches the downwards tug of Watson’s mouth, the corners pulling away from each other like the north ends of two magnets, repelling; it is difficult to focus on anything else. Beneath Watson’s touch, his heartbeat flutters against the boundaries of his skin.

“That’s not what I meant,” Watson says, though he looks unsure. But he does not hesitate before adding, quietly: “I love you.”

The corners of Holmes’ mouth twitch, upwards. “Still?” he manages. “And after all I have forced you to endure.”

Watson blinks, his brow knotting— _“Holmes,”_ he says, and presses a kiss to his mouth, softly. “Yes, God, you know the answer to that, I love you, don’t you dare to leave me without knowing that.”

“I do know it,” Holmes says, and he tightens his grip on Watson’s hand simply because he still has the strength left to do it; “better than I know anything else.”


End file.
